In addition, U.S. census data for the same five-year stretch shows that roughly 870,000 Mexicans left their home country for the United States, a smaller number than the flow of families from the U.S. to Mexico.

Thus, no invasion - despite what you may have heard.

Here's more:

Since 2009, Pew estimated there have been about 350,000 new illegal immigrants each year, about 100,000 of whom are Mexican. The rest hail from Central America, Cuba and elsewhere.

That's pronounced decline. As Pew concludes, Mexicans accounted for about half of new illegal immigrants in the years leading up to the Great Recession.

And because of that slowdown, illegal immigrants are less likely than those in the past to be recent arrivals.

Only 15 percent of unauthorized adults in 2012 had lived in the U.S. for less than five years, compared with 38 percent a decade-plus earlier, the Pew data found.

And crime? That's a non-starter, too.

Despite Trump's pernicious claims last year that Mexico is sending less than its best citizens to the United States, it's provably true that illegal immigrants commit less crime than native-born Americans.

According to a 2015 report by the American Immigration Council, based on 2010 data, 1.6 percent of immigrant males aged 18-39 were incarcerated, compared to 3.3 percent of native-born Americans.

"This disparity in incarceration rates has existed for decades, as evidenced by data from the 1980, 1990, and 2000 decennial censuses," the report concluded. "In each of those years, the incarceration rates of the native-born were anywhere from two to five times higher than that of immigrants."

Despite some clear horror stories, U.S. authorities have also become more adept at catching and deporting illegal immigrants with criminal history. In 2014, the United States deported 177,960 undocumented immigrants who were convicted criminals, CNN reported, citing Immigrations and Customs Enforcement data.

While all those deaths are still a tragedy, that's still about a thousandth of a percent of the total "estimated number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States," CNN reported.

As a consequence of much of the rhetoric now making the rounds, Americans' views of immigrants are decidedly mixed.

In a Pew poll released last September, respondents said 45-37 percent that immigrants were making American society better. Half said immigrants were making the economy and crime rates worse.

Nearly half wanted immigration reduced, and more than eight in 10 said the immigration system needed to be overhauled - a task to which Washington has proven woefully unequal -- despite a clear need for intelligent and meaningful reform.

So to review: Illegal immigration has slowed. And those who come here illegally commit fewer crimes than the native-born population.